Annette Franck, Nederland. The Pirates, FIRST Robotics Team 1584, has fielded a team every year since 2005. This year, despite construction at Nederland Middle Senior High, they persevered and found an off-site workshop and tech room to fabricate and build their 125lb, 4-foot-tall robot. A generous community member enabled them to move all their equipment, tools and materials out of the school and continue to engineer for another year. So, the Pirates sail again! We also had support from our new teacher, Mrs. Lori Ledbetter, who is co-coach for the team and had her woodworking class use the field drawings to measure, cut and build the practice field elements. One of which is a seven-foot rocket!

This year, the challenge is called Deep Space and involves moving balls and flat hatch panels to targets up to seven feet high as well as ascending to a 20 inch high platform. The team completed an intense six-week build in which they designed, fabricated, assembled and programmed a robot to meet this year’s challenge. They will compete in Denver on March 21-23, 2019. Check out the team’s website nedrobotics.org for more info on the game, competition and FIRST Robotics.

The Pirates transported the robot and some field elements to the high school to practice driving and testing function and then loaded field elements and robot back into trucks returning to the workshop to work until they had to stop for bag-n-tag night, last Tuesday. The team worked many hours at their workshop to get the robot ready for competition. Captains Hakan, Oliver and Cody put in close to 200 hours each! At competition, the team will have one day to make refinements to design and do practice matches to be ready for qualifying rounds on the Friday and Saturday of the regional competition.

The team would like to thank their mentors and the alumni that have worked alongside them this season. Watch for news of the competition and a season wrap up in April.

You can see the team and the robot on March 2, 2019, at noon, at the Back Door Theatre where they host a STEM demo and bake sale/movie fundraiser or March 5, 2019, at the NES science fair. The team welcomes your questions. Come see how much they have learned, support them and let them know they have accomplished something great!

(Originally published in the February 28, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)